Tiffany Mills premieres "Not then, not yet" at The Flea

Top: Kenneth Olguin
Bottom: left, Mei Yamanaka; right, Jordan Morley
in Tiffany Mills' Not then, not yet at The Flea Theater
(photos: Robert Altman)

Not then, not yet
Tiffany Mills Company
The Flea
November 13-16

Making themselves at home in one's subconscious are all manner of energies and drives eluding conscious control. This is the disquieting atmosphere of Not then, not yet, a work by dance artist Tiffany Mills with Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón and French vocalist/composer Muriel Louveau, now in world premiere at The Flea Theater in Tribeca.

The first sight of a few toppled metal chairs--with toppled dancers crumpled beside them--hints that this chair dance, led off by Jordan Morley, will surely go in a dark direction. Indeed, a kind of "musical chairs" game breaks out. But...no game, folks. The dancers--each dressed in Pei-Chi Su's costumes that bind together clothing details assigned along binary gender lines--don't play. Not at all. Their wary, tense actions around the chairs are cutthroat, life or death, driving towards a passage in which Morley obsessively arranges four chairs in a row that, nevertheless, ends up off-kilter. Negrón's music, including vocals by Louveau, invokes the relentlessness pace of time, pressure and complexity.

Inspired by novelist Mary Shelley's writing, the piece locates humanity in a place of precarious transition, the possibility that our inherent potential for monstrosity might consume us all. Is there a way out? Surely, the condition of life in these times raises this unsettling question every single day.

Strongly directed, the performers display physical vibrancy and vivid expressiveness--traits I've come to expect from Mills ensembles. Besides Morley and Mills herself, they are Kenneth Olguin, Nicholas Owens, Emily Pope and Mei Yamanaka, and Mills is fortunate to have every one of them.

Dramaturgy: Kay Cummings
Lighting design: Chris Hudacs

The Flea
20 Thomas Street (near Broadway), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Moving past "the feast" with dance artist Tiffany Mills

Mei Yamanaka and Tiffany Mills
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger ©2016)

Kyle Marshall and Emily Pope
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger @2016)

Hot on the dazzling tail of Ballez, the Tiffany Mills Company lights up this year's bustling La MaMa Moves festival with another must-see production--the world premiere of After the Feast. Marking Mills's fifteenth anniversary season, the hour-long sextet propels the artist and her fellow dancers through a harsh, ruined environment. The past is shattered. Now survival demands guts, transparency, cooperation and--most of all--the will to keep moving.

Mills is joined by Kyle Marshall, Jordan Morley, Kenneth Olguin, Emily Pope and Mei Yamanaka, giving all-in performances, deeply committed to the striking physical volatility and human intimacy of the work. Other collaborators include Jonathan Melville Pratt (music), Dennis O'Leary (visual design), Mary Kokie McNaugher (costumes), Chris Hudacs
 (lighting) and Kay Cummings (dramaturgy).

After the Feast runs Thursday, May 12 through Sunday, May 15. Thursday-Saturday performances are at 7pm with a 4pm performance on Sunday. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Tiffany Mills: Berries, bulls and BAC

Opening this week at Baryshnikov Arts Center 

and recommended

Top: Petra van Noort with Jeffrey Duval
Bottom: Emily Pope-Blackman with Kevin Ho
Photos: Julie Lemberger (c)2012

 

Tiffany Mills Company presents the world premiere of Berries and Bulls, a dance that relentlessly digs below the surface of long-term relationships. With her title--which sounds to me like a folk song in the making--the crafty Mills plays with duality of the masculine/feminine kind. The hour-long quartet features some serious rough-and-tumble and wit of the physical as well as verbal variety. Mills' terrific and durable dancers journey through a raw, precarious emotional landscape. If you follow them, you'll wind up feeling as if you've just been spun around in a blender, but how can you not follow Jeffrey Duval, Kevin Ho, and especially Emily Pope-Blackman and Petra van Noort?

It takes serious teamwork to pull off a work this rich and complex, and that team includes organizations and programs that gave Mills a string of residencies and space grants to develop her piece--Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Dance New Amsterdam, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BAC and Joyce Theater/Mellon Anchor Tenant Program. Getting it done!

See Berries and Bulls, Thursday-Saturday, March 1-3, 7:30pm. Opening Night will be followed by a gala. For more information and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

"Tomorrow's Legs" last night

There's a lot to admire in Tomorrow's Legs--a new ensemble piece presented by well-regarded choreographer Tiffany Mills this week at Danspace Project. Foremost, it's blessed with performances with courage, resonance, and an air of mystery. Jeffrey Duval, Luke Gutgsell, Whitney Tucker and Petra van Noort are versatile, appealing dancers who deepen and mature into the piece as we watch. Naoko Nagata has contributed some of her most flattering--while still quite quirky--costumes for the two women. And Mills's flashy visual style and rough-hewn movement attack make an irresistible mix. This woman doesn't just use space. She takes charge of it.

I was less convinced by Tomorrow's Legs as an intention and a whole package--an enigmatic collage pieced together from the fragmented fabric of memories associated with various cities--than I was by substantial swatches that felt like they could come from nobody else but Mills. Watch what unfolds when Duval begins to tug Gutgsell's arm; the entire process of getting to the resulting gutsy, risky sequence bursts and reveals itself in your mind. That sequence simultaneously drew me in and distressed me. Likewise, a charged duet involving Duval (obsessed with a science article) and van Noort (glamourously engrossed in dancing the memory of lost teenage love) lucidly articulates their differences and difficulties.

The work, running 60 minutes without intermission, can be seen again tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8:30pm. Click here for ticketing and further information on Mills's Danspace Project season, and here for her company's 2009 calendar.